bradley13

It's an emotional problem. I love writing code to solve intricate problems. But knowing that a faster, and maybe better LLM solution is just a prompt away? Somehow that takes the joy out of it. Why spend hours, when you can get an equivalent result in minutes?

I will be curious to see how I feel about AdventOfCode this year...

Correct. You may demand clean water from your local government, in return for taxes, but it isn't any sort of basic right. And certainly is not mentioned in the US Constitution.

Much like food or medical care: fundamental rights can never depend on the work of other people. Otherwise you can demand that work, which imposes on their rights.

Meh. Maybe I'm a grinch, but I don't see this as easier. I have a little NUC running Ubuntu. Putting services on it is easy: PiHole, OwnCloud, Wireguard, etc.

Our situation isn't quite that extreme, but sometimes "modern" tech is just ridiculous. For home automation, every manufacturer has their own protocol. "Matter" has just confirmed what XKCD has to say: https://xkcd.com/927/

Add to that: every manufacturer wants to run their own servers and their own cloud service. I don't want my data strewn throughout the internet. For most devices, there is zero reason they couldn't work entirely within the LAN. Plus, we all know that half of those services will die in a few years, forcing us to replace perfectly good devices.

Wow, autism in action ;-P

Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication. Imagine the backtracking required...

The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.

If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.

If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.

So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...

There are two main problems with the EU, both political.

First, the EU Commission has way too much power, and honestly wants to play dictator. Look at ChatControl: Voted down more than once, but the Commission just repackages and resubmits, with some dirty backdoor tricks, until they get it through. Parliament is not allowed to propose legislation, only the Commission.

Second, regulatory hell. The continual avalanche of regulations out of Brussels cannot be overstated. People make fun of the bottle caps, but those are absolutely illustrative of how literally everything is over-regulated. This is one of the main reasons that European industry is struggling.

This is the way. If the US imposes tariffs, impose tariffs on US goods.

The US administration twists facts to suit their agenda. For example, they often complain about the trade deficit the US has with other countries. However, that deficit often (depends on the country) only exists if you exclude digital goods (Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.).

If the rest of the world were to restrict the import of those digital goods, in the interest of fairness, the tech lobbyists would swarm D.C. in panic.

2009-2014? That's not the old web. Or I'm old. Take your pick.

The next logical step in "publish or perish". Get rid of p-o-p and this problem will also largely disappear.

I know managers and administrators want a simple metric, but there is no simple metric for research.

Wow, that website is so 1990s.

As with almost any successful system: more and more special features and edge cases get added. Git has become ridiculously complex.

I wonder: would it not be better to tell users with those edge cases to fix their problems some other way? To take an example from the article: why does someone have a filename beginning with a dash? Maybe don't do that.

Wow. 25km resolution of the exoplanet's surface.

Of course, getting the telescope into place, steering it, etc. - that's the hard part.

Humans can read it, but with difficulty. If it becomes important, AI can be taught to read it.

So...usefulness?

Requiring companies to state the actual price you will pay? Makes total sense. What I don't understand, is why thus is not already the case.

Why do hidden fees not fall under deceptive advertising, which is already actionable?

Disagree. Way too many modes of communication, which is endlessly irritating. If you want to send me a message at work, email is the common denominator.

Stupid parliamentary trick: Hold the vote on the day before the summer break - ensuring that many people have already returned to their home countries. Then use a sort of "reverse" parliamentary trick: the default is that this legislation is accepted. They needed an absolute majority - not of voting members, but of all members - to reject it.

Result: 314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions, 113 absent

The EU is well on the way to becoming a totalitarian government.

ETA: It is shocking that 276 members of parliament would vote to support this. Are so many so naive? Or being paid off?

Just yesterday I was brainstorming with ChatGPT about this. I have an ancient QNAP plus a slightly less ancient NUC running PiHole, Wireguard and other services. Both need replaced, so why not combine them?

I don't know much about ZFS, but it sounds like I need to learn. Docker may have conquered the world, but I plan to stay with LXD for services.

The one thing I take issue with: an appliance like this runs 24/7. It should be low power and fanless. A processor like the N100 seems like the obvious choice.

WTF? Bicycles on sidewalks? At least where I am, that's illegal, and I'm not moving.

I'm a teacher and I've had blind students, so I am aware of the barriers. But: do an honest evaluation of the costs of full, correct accessibility vs. the number of people who benefit. A cold-blooded calculation for a company putting out a project.

It honestly is not worth it. Huge costs, and you sell...maybe an additional license or two. So no one does it.

Which shows why guardrails on AI are just dumb. What harm could come from answering your question? None.

DMCA takedowns should not exist. If it's important, get a court judgement, where the opposing party can present a defense.

If it's not worth a court case, then it must not be very important. Or maybe they have no case.

It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.

Really, it comes down to this: censorship is bad. Always.

If someone violates the law, get a court judgement. With the judgement in hand, take down that specific material.

Too much work? Tough...

WTF is LastPasd doing, handing customer details to a market research company? Any such data should have been fully anonymized: no names, no specific addresses, etc..

For anyone looking for a recommendation: I use KeepassXC with Keepass2Android. Open source, with a local database that you can choose to sync (or not). I sync using Own cloud.

This. There really is no such thing as an entirely good government. Government is composed of people. From politicians to clerks, it's people all the way down. Some people are good, most are just trying to get through the day, and some are evil. Seriously: in any government, some of the bureaucrats and politicians will be corrupt or power hungry or sadistic or whatever.

When you give a government power, there are people in place who can and will abuse that power. If not now, then next year, or in five years. After all, power granted to the government rarely goes away.

This is the reason that you should always consider the worst case, when governments gain power. The power to ban a specific technology? What could go wrong? How could that be abused? Let me count the ways...

Can we please stop with the extreme "safeguards"? I don't want to waste processing power on a model deciding whether is can answer my question, or ensuring that it's answer is politically correct.

I use AI for a wide variety of things, of which technical is only a small part - and then it's usually a problem with project configuration, not coding. Why? Because I am often testing projects handed in by students. Projects that supposedly work on their machine, but certainly do not on mine.

Anyway, anecdotally, I find Copilot shockingly awful. It makes random changes to files that have nothing to do with the problem. Call it out, and it makes other changes to other irrelevant files.

ChatGPT and Gemini are both much better. Grok also isn't bad. Claude, I honestly haven't tried yet on these issues. Perhaps I should...

The problem with immigrants in Europe from Africa and the Middle East isn't their skin color, it's their religion, which is inseparable from their culture. Immigrants from these countries commit literally an order of magnitude (10x) more serious crimes, from assault to rape. They do not respect Western culture or law: many have explicitly stated that they want Sharia, and in many cases they have established a parallel system of Sharia courts.

Claiming people objecting to this are "racist" is completely missing the point. It's not "far right" to want to protect your society from a literal invasion of incompatible people.

Good work, and fun to read.

It's crazy that companies just stick their head in the sand, when confronted with serious security issues.

First off, money laundering does not require cash. So the premise is a bit strange.

Second, I submit that money laundering should not be considered a crime at all. Monitoring it (for example, banks required to report large cash transactions to the government) just leads to mass surveillance of innocent people.

Transferring money from A to B - why should that be a crime? The point of anti-money-laundering laws is that the money generated at point A may have been generated illegally. It isn't the money transfer that is the problem, it is the illegal activity. The police need to put in the effort to prosecute that illegal activity.

This is reminiscent of the continual pressure to break end-to-end encryption. The police want an easy way to do their (admittedly difficult) job. But the price is just too high: mass surveillance, and many false positives, affecting the general populace.